My assumption is the amount of people encoding is much smaller then decoding.

overlap exist in encode/decode. When working on a Opus codec I did have a fair amount of code distinct to one path still.

They decided to use the silicon space for other things. The Pi5 CPU is powerful enough to decode most h264 streams in software. The Pi5 has an h265 hardware decoder.

Shame. Cause h265 is problematic wrt licensing etc. I would have preferred that they kick out h265 and used the silicon for h264.

And maybe the pi5 has enough cpu to do the decoding. But how much would be left over for more interesting AI tasks ?

Well it's not fast enough for most AI tasks as it is, you'd need to offload that bit to a pcie accelerator.

Not true actually. If by offloading you mean to a device that uses a really small model with 8-bit quantized weights you are not actually solving anything.

I agree 100%

sure it's powerful enough but I'd rather it built into the hardware for energy efficiency. But I guess we can't have our cake.